Vancouver

After almost ten years and 2000 miles away from family I needed a break. I love my kid but they’re always there and I can count the number of date nights I’ve had since we moved to Massachusetts on my fingers. So when the opportunity arose I dumped the child with my mother in law, gave away Dwight Yoakham tickets, flew across the continent and crossed an international border to spend five days tagging along as my spouse went to a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As we’ve already established I’m a fan of my wife and a fan of Canada so it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. I’d even been to the city once before, a decade earlier, for a similar conference. While the ladies worked a buddy and I went sturgeon fishing on the Fraser river. I have fond memories of the city.

My buddy and his wife weren’t attending this year. I should’ve booked a fishing trip but it felt wrong to go alone, so I didn’t plan anything to do during the day. To kill the time I brought a pocket notebook and my laptop and told myself I’d use the trip as a writing retreat of sorts. I have a rough draft that’s not going well, two blog posts that need to be edited, and I’m 3/4 of the way through a fourth draft of my novel so I hoped to use my time wisely and get some writing done while my spouse worked. Instead I walked.

I dunno why. I just like strolling alone through downtown.

Maybe it’s because it’s so foreign to me. I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, population 176k and moved to Sun, Louisiana population 401 in High School. The Army sent me to Hawaii but Schofield Barracks isn’t Honolulu and my next duty station was in Fort Drum, New York. With a population of 25K, Watertown, New York is far from a thriving metropolis. I love New Orleans but it’s not a big city, not really and while we now live spitting distance away from Boston I rarely have an excuse to go downtown. Over a period of almost thirty years, I’ve been to Dallas, Brisbane, Tokyo, Kyoto, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and London but major cities still feel new and exciting.

Maybe it’s the freedom. I so rarely have hours alone with nowhere to go and nothing to do without the stress of a tourist’s sight seeing schedule or a child to entertain. I could just hoof it as far as I wanted in any direction I wanted, my only concern was making it back to the hotel for dinner. I was alone with my notebook and a million people and while I would’ve been just as happy on a hiking trail in the Canadian Rockies, maybe more so, there was plenty to see in the city. There’s no wildlife downtown, no bears or bald eagles, but within an hour I saw a Ferrari, handled a watch that cost more than my parent’s first home, and stumbled onto a movie set so my morning strolls turned out to be a safari of sorts.

I wandered parallel to the water, stumbling into Gastown by accident, not recognizing the neighborhood until I reached a gaggle of early morning tourists gathered around the steam clock. It was a cool morning and quiet. The streets largely empty aside from a crew pressure washing the sidewalks and awnings. There were a group of art students sitting cross legged on the hostile style of steel benches designed so the homeless can’t lay down. They had sketch books and small canvases and were outlining a row of what I assume were historic buildings. I stopped for a moment on one of the uncomfortable steel seats and took out my cheap notebook and G2 pen and made note of them, all the while wondering what they thought of me, writing while they were drawing.

I continued on for a while past the opening shops, an odd urban mix of expensive high fashion and cheap low souvenir where one store sold $20 Maple leaf sweatshirts and the next sold $200 red flannel shirts. I passed a donut shop and told myself I should stop but I didn’t. I passed a Kebab stand and did the same. I passed a mural of well tailored young men that someone had carefully drawn Hitler mustaches on. I wandered into a record store that was playing Gordon Lighfoot. They had vinyl in wooden crates and vintage concert t-shirts and a stellar collection of country music. I realized as I quietly thumbed through the crates of vinyl that I was wearing a Mike and the Moonpies concert tee standing shoulder to shoulder with a purple haired girl in a NOFX t-shirt. I wished I had carry on room to safely bring home some vinyl. Instead I left empty handed.

I walked past a gaggle of art kids outside of a building labeled “Vancouver Film School” and I couldn’t help but think how much I would have hated them as a young man. Now I envy them. I’m secretly jealous of their ability to “waste” time and money on art. In a weird way I envy their bravery, their willingness to try. If only I had been so bold at their age. I can’t help but wonder if my young man’s hate is the same emotion as my old man’s envy just sanded down and smoothed out by time and miles and lessons learn. Half of them will probably end up in sales. Still I wish them well. I wish I’d been brave enough to join them.

I headed back toward waterfront station then, in search of a restroom that I found in a basement food court a few blocks away. From there it was back to the hotel and a late afternoon meeting with my wife. It was under those towering modern buildings that I noticed something that bothered me. I passed thousands of people on my stroll most going by largely unnoticed, but I could tell from a distance when I passed a wealthy woman. There was something different about the way they looked. Sometimes it was the cosmetic surgery, filler and implants, a plastic, alien face that seemed so odd and off putting I wondered if they did it on purpose. Did they intentionally pay to ensure that their face didn’t look like “normal” people? Was the silicon as much a status marker for these women as Ferraris were for the balding men who dated them? There was also a more subtle, understated wealth, harder to spot from a distance but just as alien up close, a slick, fashionable, polish that the rank and file just didn’t have. After a while the wealthy began to look like a vaguely different species, as if I was a rescue lab mix and they were a pure bred AKC French Bulldog, technically the same, but different and less functional.

That evening we took a water bus to North Vancouver and went to a few breweries. Micro breweries are the same everywhere it seems. There’s usually polished stainless steel, tall tables, QR codes, a hipster and a hippie, a bike, a dog, a baby and far too many IPAs. Vancouver was better in that regard. I managed three pints and a flight without a single IPA. The beers were all pretty good. The pastor tacos were not but I didn’t expect them to be. I can’t drink anymore. Four pints did me in. We went to bed early and I woke before daylight with a screaming headache and for the first time in a long time ended up puking. I was hungover for my next morning’s ramble.

The next morning as I set off I heard the all too familiar sounds of police sirens and V8 engines. Vancouver is quieter than most down towns, at least the days I was there. Sirens seem rare and there's something, a sixth sense earned with years on a night shift, that told me these were real. Something serious was happening somewhere nearby. News had broken of an assassination and a mass shooing the day before and I had a rare moment of panic, worrying about my wife and the conference and at the same time I had a moment of jealously, wishing I was where I can’t help but still feel like I belong, riding along again in the passenger seat of a patrol car responding code three. A friend told me later about witnessing Vancouver police shoot a man with a pepper ball gun after he poured a liquid on himself and threatened to self immolate. I didn’t bother to check the news later to confirm the story.

As it was those sirens were an omen.

Again I found myself wandering into Gastown, past the steam clock and the donut shop that I swore I was going to stop at eventually. My East coast brain thinks of the ocean as East, so I thought I was turning North when I left Gastown. It was still morning. Still calm. The streets were still wet and clean from the power washing. I left a place of cool quiet, a place of art kids and lanyard wearing, cruise ship tourists and in three blocks I stumbled into something different and awful.

The smell was my first indication. Urine, sweat, and shit. Before I knew it a man stumbled around a corner, walking toward me with a bulbous glass pipe in his mouth. My Texas cop brain made it a meth pipe, but my Louisiana cop brain made him as an opioid addict. I’ve been out of the game for a long time. I know crackheads, tweakers, junkies, and pill addicts but I’d never seen Fentanyl. Until arriving in Vancouver I’d never seen the monstrous way it hunched people over like Golum and made them stagger like the living dead but in a few blocks I would learn. In between Gastown and Chinatown I stumbled on a homeless encampment that hadn’t yet broken up for the day. The gentleman with a pipe would be the first of many that I watched taking their first hit of the day as I continued onward.

I don’t know why I kept going. I had no reason to and I didn’t want to see. I was torn between wanting to prove to myself that I wasn’t afraid and the sick feeling that I’d accidentally become a tourist to their misery. I had no destination. My choice was to press onward through their midst or retreat and both options left me feeling somewhat ashamed. So I moved forward. I continued my aimless ramble right through their midst and it was awful. The high fashion and low souvenir shops were gone, replaced with boarded up store fronts, empty plate glass windows and graffiti. The ground was no longer scrubbed clean but littered with broken glass, spoiled food and feces. People slumped in corners or gathered in small clumps oblivious to my presence. The lucky had sleeping bags and crude mats. The unlucky passed out on the concrete. I’ve slept on enough concrete floors to know that misery. I’d need the Fentanyl to sleep like these poor souls were forced to.

The sadness of it was overwhelming. The miserable waste of it all. Once upon a time I would have been afraid. Once upon a time I would have been angered at the perceived failure of the homeless. Instead I just felt a familiar heavy sadness. I walked amongst people I couldn’t help. I looked at a problem I can’t solve. Once upon a time I believed in bootstraps but there is no pulling yourself up from a Vancouver street corner. For two blocks I saw failure. For two blocks I saw a problem and with every step I carried the weight of knowing there wasn’t anything I could do as an individual. I didn’t even have Canadian cash on me. I couldn’t even pass on a few Loonies and Toonies to buy breakfast or a fix.

So I kept walking, on to Chinatown long enough to see street signs with golden dragons on top, then back East toward the blocks that held hundred thousand dollar watches, Ferrari’s and the AKC French Bulldog people with their hard silicon faces. The encampment had broken up some on my return trip. The people there had wandered off. I was wearing a t-shirt with a sparkling pink unicorn and “Alpha Male” written across the front in rainbow font and a dirty young woman with blond dreadlocks asked me why I’d raided her closet. I wasn’t sure what to say so I told her my XL tee shirt was too big for her. I tried to make it a joke. I don’t know if it landed, but she told me to have a nice day.

Two blocks later and the homeless were behind me. The broken windows, shabby motels, cheap apartments and empty storefronts once again replaced with sparkling new high rise buildings and shiny people. The transition between the two worlds was shocking. It was infuriating. How? Why? What the fuck is wrong with us that we let this misery fester in a place with such obvious wealth? Why can’t we fix this? How did a drug that helped save my life cause such untold misery in others? Why, at forty-six years old and finally somewhat comfortable have I just now found the empathy to care? I still have no answer, but I saw a Bentley convertible on the walk back to the hotel. The driver was a bald man.

Tired of Gastown, on the third day I turned South toward high end shopping and later East toward trees. I’m debating becoming a sweater guy for the coming winter and figured what better place to look than Canada, and maybe if I got lucky I could avoid a few bullshit tariffs. I found the Vancouver art gallery before the mall. It was surrounded by a series of small protests. There was a protest in support of Gaza. Another against the Iranian Islamic regime and a third where I didn’t recognize the flags or the language scrawled on their signs. Amid all this was also a small craft fair with handmade “One Piece” stuffies and somehow a white rapper.

I strolled through the Pacific Center Mall looking for a fisherman’s sweater and coming up empty, stopping only long enough to look over a well stocked display of Citizen watches and wish I’d come with a watch budget. Once again I found myself in the world of the French Bulldog people and somehow a single, solitary, no shit Canadian lumberjack in wood chip covered work clothes that smelled of pine from ten feet away. Leaving, I turned North and strolled Granville street, past music venues and restaurants and a leather and spike clad band eating undisturbed on an open patio. I continued North until I once again stumbled on a man passed out on an inhospitable steel bench with a glass pipe in his mouth and once again I turned back toward the land of lanyards and French Bulldogs.

On the return trip I found myself “stuck” behind four Sikh men walking hand in hand and like the art kids from the day before I realized I once would have hated them and now I couldn’t help but feel vaguely jealous at their easy camaraderie. I dunno if I’d hold Chucks hand while we stroll around but I realized I’d like the option to. Maybe I will one day. Maybe I’ll reach out and take his hand while we’re walking, just to fuck with him. It struck me then how diverse my surroundings were. I saw Indigenous people and Asians, white folks and black. I passed an Afghan family opening a basement chai shop that I’m disappointed I didn’t have the time to try. I heard a half dozen languages and it didn’t bother me. In fact it was rather pleasant, and I thought then of how many people I know who would be angered by this diversity and I can’t understand why. Of all of them, the Sikhs, Muslims, and Buddhist, the Vietnamese, Chinese, Arab and Indigenous I was the stranger and it was fine. In fact I found that I rather enjoyed it.

I tired of concrete so I turned East at my hotel, toward the trees of Stanley Park. The sun was up, the fog burnt off and the day turned warm and humid and I realized I like cities a little better in the chill of winter though I’m not sure why. I passed a wedding on a yacht and another on a harbor side patio where I overheard the best man confidently give a terrible speech. He somehow used the phrase “the people with us here today” three times in three sentences. I was walking past again later when the bride and groom exchanged vows. At the same time, a young couple were walking hand in hand past and I saw as the girl smiled and said “awwwww” while her boyfriend secretly rolled his eyes. I made it to the gates of Stanley Park before my knee gave out and I was forced to limp back to the hotel to rest. I wanted to sit in the shade of the trees there and look at the water but I never quite made it just like I never got donuts or street corner kebab in Gastown. Maybe next time.

I don’t know that I learned anything of substance about myself or the world around me during my walks. At best it reinforced the growing idea that I am not cut out for the suburbs and that I can function downtown or in the woods but not in between. I doubt it. I have a tendency to fall in love with the cities I visit, even Boston once. The probability is that high rise Vancouver living would inevitably, eventually, break me the same way Massachusetts has. I can’t understand why walking around a downtown was so relaxing on foreign soil when it’s so stressful closer to home. I’m betting it’s because I had no responsibilities and only myself to worry about. The opportunity to aimlessly wander is so rare these days. In the end I flew across the continent to wander aimlessly between dates with my wife. I got nothing but chafed inner thighs, an aching left knee, six notebook pages of badly scrawled notes and 3,237 words on this page.

All in all I think it was worth it.

I know two songs about Vancouver. Both are real bangers. Neither has anything to do with this trip, but I like sharing music so...